


like seeds across the ground

by sinagtala (strikinglight)



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Black Eagles Route, Gardens & Gardening, Mid-Canon, Shippy Gen, takes place mostly during the timeskip years with a little flashbacking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:22:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27682831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/sinagtala
Summary: A fact Yuri has learned, over the years, about Dagdan flytraps: if you plant them in soil infused with magic, they get excited. When they get excited, they nip.In which Yuri learns about things that grow.
Relationships: Yuris Leclair | Yuri Leclerc/Bernadetta von Varley
Comments: 4
Kudos: 53





	like seeds across the ground

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pomme (manta)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/manta/gifts).



> This fic was written for my dear Winny, in anticipation of her most auspicious birthday. She fell hard and fast for Yuribern after looking at two caps of them sharing a meal and I was happy to add a little fuel to the fire, as it were. Love you, Winny! I'm so happy you were born for me to terrorize (and also just simply that you were born)!
> 
> The facts about Dagdan flytraps enumerated herein are loosely based on actual Venus flytrap lore, but I'm not a botanist, and so have been very shoddy about the science. 
> 
> [Title.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzLLLJlXqFs)

A fact Yuri has learned, over the years, about Dagdan flytraps: if you plant them in soil infused with magic, they get excited. When they get excited, they nip.

The little crop he’s been tending in the back of the greenhouse ever since the war broke out has brought it to a habit, now, the suckers. Every fortnight or so, he comes topside to feed a healing spell or two into the soil, comes away with tiny needlepoint scratches on his fingertips and a touch of an acid burn in exchange for his goodwill. Some days he thinks he ought to turn them over onto the compost pile in vengeance, although he knows he won’t.

“It’s your fault for spoiling them,” Hapi says, as she plucks berries from the thornbushes with her back to him. This is not the first time she’s said it and it’s unlikely to be the last. “If you just left them alone to catch flies or whatever, they’d probably be fine, right?”

Yuri considers the flytraps, clustered together in their big terracotta pot. The fan-shaped jaws, green and glossy as a jewel on the outside, a dark and bloody red inside. The slender stems, the fangs. Suddenly he’s tempted to say they’re not all that bad—and he can’t be spoiling them, if there’s practically nothing he needs to do for them otherwise. They grow in low light, in otherwise poor soil. The flies and wasps and caterpillars that wander in now and then are more than enough by way of prey to feed on. All they ever seem to want from Yuri is water, and his magic, such as it is.

They are three years into the war now. The greenhouse, crumbling and ruined thing, is not what it was, the windows cracked, the flowerbeds repurposed for yet more vegetables. No one has any use for these carnivorous plants that Yuri tends, that he only tends because someone had no choice but to leave them behind. Even Yuri, when all is said and done, has no use for them. It just so happened that he’s the one who stayed.

A fact: Dagdan flytraps die, even, if you give them too much attention. Overwatering is a common cause for homegrown varieties, as are overfeeding, and overfertilizing. Yet another fact: in the wild Dagdan flytraps only ever grow out in the marshes and bogs of their homeland. Places no one looks after, places where nothing can be expected to look after anything else.

“When have you known me to ever settle for fine?” Almost on cue, the smallest of the flytraps, the one he calls Little Sofia, goes for his fingers again. Yuri jerks his hand away. “Ugh, damnation. Don’t make me uproot you, ingrate.”

Hapi’s laugh is nearly soundless—two easy breaths, and no more. “Have fun lying in the bed you made, Yuri-Bird.”

* * *

Yuri had not promised Bernadetta anything, years ago, when he told her offhand that he had a surprise for her down below in Abyss, if she was brave enough to come and get it.

He had not expected her to do it. Not little Bernadetta von Varley, who’d never be caught dead more than a stone’s throw from her room if she could help it. So it was its own small miracle when one day after stable duty she followed him all the way to the front door of the underground, and then down the steps, holding the back of his coat in one shaking hand.

A small miracle, but life was full of those, even here in the dark. By then Yuri had seen enough of them to know.

The night before, he’d won a paper packet of tiny black seeds off an ex-mercenary at the Wilting Rose, who told them that if he took them topside they’d grow into little monsters. He told this to Bernadetta, in turn, in the doorway of his room, as he handed it to her. She’d refused to cross the threshold, and perhaps wisely so.

“You like those, right? Those monster plants. Carni-whatevers.”

Bernadetta had peered into the packet, eyes darting suspiciously from the seeds to Yuri’s face, to the shadows at her feet, to the seeds again. “It’s practically impossible to find flytrap seeds this side of the Dagdan Channel, and you’re just giving them to me? Why?” Those eyes had narrowed, as though she meant to scream and run away from him that very second, uncaring of the dark, or of not knowing the way. “They’re not really going to grow, are they? Are you actually trying to poison me? You’re trying to poison me, aren’t you?”

Yuri had only sighed and taken her by the wrist, leading her back the way they came, seeds and all.

“If I wanted to poison you, I’d have done it already. And as for whether they’re going to grow, well. Why don’t you tell me?”

* * *

Yuri’s never met Bernadetta von Varley, general of the Imperial army, commander of the third archer platoon. He doesn’t think he ever will, however many years that girl who calls herself Emperor now sees fit to drag the war on. He knows only Bernadetta whose plants he is keeping watch over, still growing among the ruins.

When she returns, this Bernadetta, to see what is left of Garreg Mach, it will be winter. Yuri will be on his knees on the stones, checking the dormant flytraps for mold, and as she comes to stand beside them he will point to them all, one bent and gently folded head at a time, and say, _This one is Little Sofia. And these are Nerisse, and Arabella, and Christophine. Real princesses the lot of them._ He will say, _They’ll be trying to bite your fingers off come the spring. Just you wait._

* * *

At the beginning of the endeavor, Yuri had said, well. Nothing at all, not even that the old scholar at the Wilting Rose had told him Dagdan flytraps would take a year or two to fully grow from seed—that their growing would likely outlast Bernadetta’s time here, several times over. If Bernadetta knew this, or had found it out in her own time, she never let on, either. A surprise in itself, to say the least.

And for all their long growing, those seeds seemed to germinate in no time at all, putting out little green spikes in the big clay pot where Bernadetta had scattered them over their first fortnight in her care. At this stage her tending of these seedlings, as far as Yuri could tell, consisted mostly of sitting with them. Singing to them, or reading to them in the early morning when the greenhouse was empty and no one important was awake, much less likely to pass by and hear.

Yuri did not, at the time, keep watch over the seedlings. Certainly he did not keep watch over Bernadetta. If the professor wanted him to take charge of pruning the thorns off the Albinean berry bushes—itself a thankless task no one else wanted, for all their readiness to partake of the fruit once it had been boiled in sugar syrup and defanged—then Yuri was all too happy to oblige between his duties to Abyss. The early morning only happened to be the most convenient time.

Bernadetta, absorbed not so much in the active care of her plants as, simply, in the being with them, did not scream and run away from him, those mornings. She was too busy murmuring under her breath the names she would give them when they were fully grown _._ And Yuri, who had been a gardener’s boy once in a previous life and still had the callouses on his fingers to show for it, could only smile to himself and conclude that nature was full of miracles.

* * *

When Yuri sets his eyes on the Bernadetta that returns to Garreg Mach, in what will become the last year of the war, he sees it plain: she, too, is a thing that grows.

She’s taller, and her hair is longer, and there are freckles across her nose from being out in the sun—out on the field, no doubt. Her eyes are the same; still wary, still darting about like skittish little birds. But also not the same, for the steel he can see in them now. There’s a quiver of arrows slung over her left shoulder.

Yuri wonders what that archer’s eye observes, when she looks at him. When she looks at all of this, the whole time-worn and ragged tapestry of it—the overgrown flowerbeds, and Yuri down on one knee by his clay pot, head bent down, the sallow light of the winter sun on the back of his neck. Maybe there’s nothing left to regret, when they’ve all seen better days.

“Well, if it isn’t the general herself,” he greets her, without preamble. “You did come back, after all. Don’t stand on ceremony, now; come in, come in.”

The way she frowns, too, is still the same—one small uncertain furrow between the eyebrows—and the way she fidgets her fingers together, standing framed in the doorway.

“We did all make a promise,” she says, softly, seemingly as much to the windows and the walls and the plants as to him. “I just—I just wasn’t sure there’d be anything left.”

Yuri does not tell her there’s always something left, even if it’s just the weeds growing over the old bones of whatever came before, finding ways to survive. Something always remains, if you care to come back and look for it.

Maybe he doesn’t need to say as much to her, now. She is, after all, the first of them to arrive—and she’ll soon find that the seeds she scattered all those years ago have been wintering here, all along.

“There’s plenty left,” he says, instead, and beckons her over to where her precious flytraps are sleeping, too cowed by the cold to bite for now. Just for now. “There’s plenty left. Come and look.”


End file.
